From the Editor

Published in the September 23, 2009, issue

PAW’s new Alumni Scene section, which starts on page 38, brings together alumni coverage that had been spread throughout other parts of the magazine.

Last February, many of you received a survey about PAW and PAW Online. More than 4,000 recipients responded, and we have used that information in planning how to use these pages. Alumni continue to read and enjoy PAW (more than 94 percent rated the magazine excellent or good), for which we are grateful. But there also were many suggestions, and you should see the results of some of those ideas throughout the year.

Though PAW continues to have the same features and departments, we changed the magazine’s organization in ways we hope will provide more flexibility and allow the strength of an article’s content — not a design format — to determine how we present it. Our Notebook section now brings together all campus news, including sports and our student-written On the Campus column. We also created a new section, Alumni Scene, which will provide more focus and consistency in our alumni coverage. There you will find news of alumni ­authors and artists — along with ­articles about alumni scientists, nonprofit entrepreneurs, scholars, and others who have received less attention in the past.

We made space-saving adjustments where we could. By changing the format in our Memorials section, for example, we gained space for additional memorials without decreasing the length or type size.

Online at paw.princeton.edu, PAW’s Weekly Blog is expanding its coverage of campus and alumni news, with updates most weekdays to provide more timely reports. We also created a listing of nonprofit organizations that were begun by alumni (with contact information). This, we hope, will make it easier for readers to connect with alumni who have similar interests in the nonprofit world.

It’s clear that the next two years will be challenging, as our two “industries” — publishing and academia — confront new economic realities, and we expect to print fewer pages than in the recent past. But we hope that the changes we made this year will allow us to get the most out of every page, and that readers will visit PAW Online regularly to continue the conversation.

We open the year with feature articles about two graduates from different eras who studied the working lives of people in opposite corners of American society. Walter Wyckoff 1888, a well-connected son of missionaries, chose to explore the lives of late 19th-century laborers by becoming one. A century later, Karen Ho *03 prepared to write her dissertation on the culture of Wall Street by landing a job at an investment bank. Some things, these two scholars learned, cannot be taught in a classroom — even one at Princeton.